So, first thing is first: I love graphic design, so this week was a fun challenge for me. Unfortunately some work on my senior history thesis put a dent in some of the time that I wanted to spend on this week’s assignments, but I still really enjoyed it. The design blitz was fun, especially […]

Typography   I’m a huge sucker for great typography. I love different typefaces and pairing the right ones together. This book cover for Bruce Holsinger’s The Invention of Fire is a fantastic example of good typography. Right away you know the book is probably set in the Middle Ages (the calligraphic Gothic script in “the” paired with […]

For this assignment, I watched two episodes of the Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design, specifically the episodes on graphic design and illustration (which I thought were the most fitting for this week). First, I was surprised to see I’d seen Paula Scher and Christoph Niemann’s work in my every day life. Once I got […]

Thanks to yet another great font from dafont.com (this one called Road Rage), I created a signature/inital/monogram logo for my spy character, Roderick Rush. There’s something really cool about a sort of combined signature, like Albrecht Dürer’s. I was looking for a font that conveyed something youthful but visceral, edgy but not over the top, […]

  For this assignment, I had to design a tattoo with at least two design elements included. It’s not the prettiest or cleanest tattoo design in the world, but it works for this assignment. I chose a viking theme for this one. The left side is a bearded axe, one of the most common viking […]

  NGDIDJTSN PKRNPDOF PUQC TS QNVNJ CUJRPNR CPQ.       This is the secret message of my own cipher. I used a substitution alphabet keyword cipher. Basically, the way this type of cipher works is where you put your keyword to the first letters of the alphabet, and then you just align the rest of […]

My Destination Post Card assignment is relatively simple, but I think the design works pretty well for it. I chose a CC-0 image and CC-0 fonts (from pexels.com and dafont.com, two of my favorite resources). It took me a while to find the perfect font to match the image, but I think this one works […]

Well, fellow spies, as you can guess, I’m going to go ahead and say it’s been yet another difficult week. On the other hand, this was very different from anything I’ve done in school before. I had the benefit of having already used Audacity and GarageBand and already having been into radio shows/podcasts, but there […]

Listening to the Limetown radio show was a pretty interesting experience. I unfortunately had to miss an episode due a class time conflict, but the overall impression I got was positive. The show had pretty excellent quality in terms of production. The audio was all very good quality (although at times the writing was a […]

For the Remix a Song With Some Speech assignment, I chose a speech made by Senator Ron Paul in 2011 set to free use music by Jon Watts (found at the Free Music Archive). This is one of my favorite speeches ever made. Of course, it’s a controversial speech, and you may not agree with […]

“Moon Graffiti” was a great example of modern radio drama. I actually listen to The Truth podcast as often as they add new episodes, along with some other podcasts from Radiotopia.  I was actually really surprised I’d never heard their pilot episode. While not quite as polished as their recent work, “Moon Graffiti” was a pretty fantastic […]

This is the radio bumper I created for DS106 Radio. I recorded three tracks of myself using GarageBand. The rest was edited with three sound effects (an affected horn, affected violin, and a clock ticking) found on FreeSound.org, with the help of users...

For the Remake the Genre assignment, I chose one of my favorite punk songs, Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye (also called Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye). The original song is in its own way a cover, or more of a remix, of an American Civil War song. In the Irish tradition, it’s an anti-war/resistance song first […]

This is my sound effect story. Creating this took a bit of work, because I had to hunt down very specific sounds I had in mind and find the right ones. For example, I wanted to find ambient traffic and city sounds that you hear in the beginning and toward the end. I ended up […]

This one was yet another challenging week (hey, I think I see a pattern!). I had more technical difficulties, but this time on my end. The learning curve for photography wasn’t too bad, since I have at least some background with both that and Photoshop, but fitting my photographs to a narrative or finding a […]

   (take a picture of something plastic) (take a picture of an animal (domestic/pet/wild)) (take a picture of death) (take a picture of vertical lines) (take a picture of something spinning) (take an abstract picture without using the viewfinder) (take a picture of something while looking through something else)  

@ds106 #washingtonspacevikings pic.twitter.com/c5pYZOe7eW — Daniel Hawkins (@Hawkins10000) February 11, 2017 I wasn’t able to directly upload the picture I made for this assignment (which was to combine three images into one “impossible” image), so I tweeted it and embedded it here. I’ve combined Washington Crossing the Delaware with a space/sci-fi wallpaper and a photograph of a reconstructed […]

Shadows are great at telling stories. I think I have always loved the way shadows look in pictures, the way they act as positive space while at the same time being the absence of light. For the “Shadow of a Doubt” assignment, I took a picture of a friend holding a toy revolver on a brick […]

These aren’t my birds, but they are definitely lovebirds. Blueberry (left) and Elsa (right) are two pretty young parakeets who’ve been living together for almost a year. From the second they met, they were hopelessly in love, and they found that their personalities complemented one another. Before they found each other, Blueberry was a rough-and-tumble […]

Below are some of the main points that make a photograph interesting. Selection: Saul Leiter’s “Red Curtain” exemplifies the element of selection in photography in a couple of ways. First, despite the name of the the photo (which adds some irony), Leiter made the decision not just to photograph a random red curtain in a […]

I do not normally take a lot of photos, but I have done a little photography for past art assignments in school or while on vacation. My photographs are mostly of myself, friends, family, etc. or landscapes/nature. Having some educational background in photography, I know some basic rules and elements (rule of thirds, depth of […]

  Well, it looks like it was another difficult but interesting week. I think I’m getting the hang of this a little better. Unfortunately, I ran into some technical difficulties late in the week (had to have been the Russians again) and couldn’t access any of the blogs, the assignment bank, my own blog, etc. […]

If I could choose any time and place to live, I would probably pick somewhere in Europe in the 13th century. I am a huge nerd for medieval history, so I would probably love it. Ideally, I would live in a castle or defensible manor, where I would eat roast pheasant in my awesome dining hall […]

Kurt Vonnegut (who I started reading around middle school) has some great advice for storytelling. In my post this week on my character background, the arc that Roderick Rush has followed thus far is on the path for the “Cinderella” story arc. Rush’s story starts relatively low on the “happiness” line due to his personality. […]

This is a photo I did not take of the ambassador of an unnamed country meeting with the CEO of a biotechnology firm and a representative of an organization known as ORION. The CEO sits in a sleek, suede chair in the corner of a hotel suite with a large window, a billionaire philanthropist to the […]

Writing three haikus Is much harder than it seems Like rocket science Thinking of the words, Five syllables first and last, Seven in between Hey, I’ve got this now I feel like William Shakespeare ……Refridgerator?

You may have never heard the name Roderick Rush, but most spies have. The intelligence community believes Roderick Rush was born in South Carolina in or about 1990. Based on what records have been collected, Rush attracted the interest of several organizations while in school, where he scored in the genius range in several intelligence […]

My spy character, Roderick Rush, is inspired by several other spies from literature, television, and film along with a lot of my own invention. In large part, I based him and part of his backstory on Jason Bourne. Although I’ve never been as big of a fan of the Bourne novels or movies as some […]

It’s no secret the weird and wonderful Kingsman: The Secret Service draws on decades worth of pop culture of spy films and television shows. The movie is stuffed top-hat to shoe-phone with references to James Bond, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, and of course, Mission: Impossible. Kingsman is far more than parody and homage, […]

As Professor Bond said it would be, this week was a challenge. In a lot of ways, it felt like getting dropped into the deep end of digital storytelling (hopefully that was the goal, or else this is going to be difficult semester!). I’m getting a better feel for the course, and so far I’m […]